Calibre – E-Book Management • Hacker News Board

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#171

Post by Isthatablackgsd » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #100

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #24

Calibre is one of those rare examples of software where the kitchen-sink approach is absolutely warranted. It's a one-stop shop for pretty much everything related to e-book management, conversion, or creation. I spend most of my time in Calibre just managing my library or converting ebooks between formats (particularly if I'm pulling ebooks off my Kindle or Kobo to strip their DRM). When I want to test whether the co…

> Calibre is one of those rare examples of software where the kitchen-sink approach is absolutely warranted. I disagree, and that's why I generally do not use Calibre, despite being an ebook aficionado. ...I already have my own ebook organization management. I'd like a good ebook reader, and I'd appreciate some of the surrounding tools, but Calibre's monolithic design isn't useful in my case. It seems like even runni…

I happened to read Kovid justification[0] of this kitchen-sink approach few days ago and I agreed with Kovid. Before I was dead-set against his idea, and now I understand why it is the best for calibre.

It boils down to database and robustness. Filesystem and OS have their particular way of how it manage the files. And sometime when the file are being used and when calibre try to modify/something to the file, it can lead to unpredictable situation such as data corruption. And some OS sandboxed/isolated the app from ever touching outside of it own home directory unless explicitly permitted to do so. Sometime, it can be a permission weirdness. It is less variables for Kovid to worry and putting the software itself in control of the directory.

Also, another variable that Kovid don't have to worry about is between the keyboard and the chair errors. Users does stupid shit with it and those management software are sensitive to sudden changes without the software's awareness. Sure, you can set the path to find it again (it can be a pain for some), it didn't mean everything is jolly good. Some will force itself to rebuild the database to ensure it accounts for every bit of data. Those softwares are THAT particular and I can understand why.

Zotero does the same thing (and they preferred it), but Zotero does allows users to decide where it should be. Shoko Desktop/Server preferred their own but does allows users.

And the biggest advantage of calibre's approach is that its library only exist in single directory. You can move the folder itself without worrying the data corruption.

[0]: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#id33

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#172

Post by Isthatablackgsd » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 10:10 PM UTC

AcidBurn wrote: post #73

I recently started self hosting calibre-web[0] which consumes a calibre database and provides a basic web interface for viewing and uploading books to it. The killer feature for me is that it can act as a Kobo sync server. It makes getting my entire library onto my e-reader a breeze. 0: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

Ditto. I did the same for my partner for his Lego instruction booklet collection. He have over 150 sets and managing all of his Lego booklet (through Lego official app) and the official Lego website don't have every single booklet. And those PDFs are rather large file (averaging 40+MB, some are 100MB, a few is 200MB). It wasn't feasible to keep it all in his iPad due to the storage space. So I used my desktop to handles that for him. The best thing about calibre-web, it allows him to upload the PDF and edit the metadata directly in his iPad's Safari than depending on me to put it up for him (I don't mind doing for him, just that I have terrible time management.) For him, he don't have to do manual management and it is in one place.

Right now, I am trying to set up a scrapping the metadata from few sites in calibre (Import List plugin). Because LibraryThing, WorldCatalog and Amazon are usually scrapping for books. The thing is I don't know how to do XPath expression even I tried to read the guide. I couldn't understand how the hell it work. I can understand LaTeX, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Bash, CSS documentation just fine, but XPath I am just dumbfounded.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#173

Post by Isthatablackgsd » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #60

thrower123 wrote: post #16

The one thing I really don't like about Calibre is how it will copy all of my ebooks into its own file organization. There is probably a way to disable this, but that is the default. Kind of irritating when you have Calibre in a cloud-storage folder and your books are also in the cloud storage, and it uses up your space with duplicates.

...and rewrites/truncates the file titles

It is not meant for you, it is done that way by design for calibre's database. If you use the export feature, then you can set how the way you want it.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#174

Post by timwaagh » Sun, May 02, 2021, 7:49 AM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #157

timwaagh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally stated 'or the few sites that don't do ERP'. Of course calibre does have legal use cases. Playing with (I think) O'Reilly ebooks and project Gutenberg being some of them. I did not mean to imply it has no legal use. However stripping DRM and converting is not one of them. It's a form of copyright infringement as well, depending on where you are. I'm not sure how 'calibre has nothing to do with illegal cop…

> I literally stated 'or the few sites that don't do ERP'. Of course calibre does have legal use cases. Playing with (I think) O'Reilly ebooks and project Gutenberg being some of them. The only acronym i've heard for ERP is "Enterprise resource planning" so i'm not sure how that was relevant... and still am not because even searching in Google about what the acronym means all i get is definitions and explanations for…

electronic rights protection. i suppose i should have used DRM.

Re: Calibre – E-Book Management

#175

Post by alanbernstein » Wed, May 05, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #95

schwartzworld wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit over just converting to html and using a browser? As far as I know epub is just html anyway.

Mostly; the structural information is in a mix of XHTML and various XML schemas. Conceptually it's more like that weird "HTML archive" format that IE used to do back when, but considerably more complex, and much less terrible thanks to being a W3C standard and not MIME-encoded. The .epub file itself is just a zip archive. You can open it that way and pull the HTML content out, if you want, although it may be a pain t…

This is off topic, but I found a recent comment from you just so I could thank you for recommending Free Radical a little while ago. I never even played the game, but the book is excellent on its own.